The ants have been building a cemetery
between the panes of my northern
window; they've been at it all winter. Every morning, when I
return from work, I check their progress and count the withered
ant corpses lying helter skelter along the sill. The mortician
ants arrange their dead precisely, but without apparent design.
Tiny sunbeams reflect orange ant-shadows through condensation
on the glass. The mortician ants struggle without rest until
they drop, and are in turn stacked in neat little piles by their
successors.

Everyone I have ever known is dead or doomed.
On these cold spring mornings I often feel that I belong there,
between the panes, heaped like cordwood by the dedicated ants.

The human species did not, as many predicted,
go out in a blaze of arrogance. We did not blow our collective
selves to ionized dust; we did not choke on our own toxic excrement;
our progeny did not become so numerous that they consumed our
ecosphere out from under us. The end turned out to be simpler
than anyone expected, simpler and more abrupt. And completely
unforeseen.

No one was more surprised than David and
me. We were, at the time, doing genetic research for the Human
Genome Project, humanity's vainglorious attempt to map its own
uniqueness. David worked with a group trying to break down a
sequence involved in the Y chromosome complex, and I tormented
fruit flies with the concept of mutagenesis. For every generation
of Drosophila that I could endow with an extra pair of legs growing
in place of their antenna, I smugly took another step toward
my niche in the Halls of Darwin.

I remember the day my species died as clearly
as if it were this very morning. Was it really that sudden? Yes,
I can pinpoint the day -- the hour, even -- although no one realized
the truth of our extinction for several more years. I remember
it because that day, David and I fought. Our fights, though rare,
were often bitter, and never about what they were really about.
I remember that fight. It was our last.

I am no longer a scientist. Since David's
. . . since that awful year, I've worked the graveyard shift
at the Mivart Home for Deleterious Mutations, spending my dreary
hours at the main desk. Except for the occasional spontaneous
ectogeneration, the odd bouts of screaming, the rare episode
of parthenogenesis, the late shift revolves around the endless
repetition of tedious acts. Pointless duties that begin to blur
into one single eternity of drear. As the winter grows old and
dies, I have begun to depend on my morning vigils at the window
with the ants. More and more, the insect necropolis addicts me.

For the previous two days, David had been
growing a sullen mood. It hung across his shoulders like a sphagnum.
"Yeah. So?"

To be honest, I was feeling fairly mossy
myself. "What virus?" My heels made sharp punctuation
clicks on the hall tile.

Chaim, for all his intellect, was impervious
to emotional subtlety. He fell into step beside me, and his hands
danced like orbiting electrons. "You know. That weird plague
in Indonesia. That saltationist thing."

"Bullshit." David's moods precluded
humor.

Of course, I knew what Chaim meant. The
plague, isolated to a small, primitive island east of Borneo,
had been widely reported in the popular media, had in fact merited
two column-inches in Nature. But I was reacting to David's blossoming
acrimony. "Really?" I tried to make my voice suggest
fluttering eyelashes. David hated that tone. "I thought
that spontaneous mutation stuff turned out to be a hoax."

"Not true," Chaim continued,
oblivious to the gathering storm. "I've seen the data. It
was like some sort of gene-based malignancy. The poor bastards
just started evolving until it killed them. One of them actually
grew feathers. I'm not kidding."

Normally, David thrived on nonsensical
speculation; it was a game that appealed to his sophomoric sense
of humor. But on that day, a swelling anger obscured his juvenile
spirit, made him older, and humorless. "Bullshit,"
he repeated. "It'll turn out to be some sort of perverse
government eugenics experiment."

"You're probably right." Chaim
winked at me. "Probably trying to crossbreed. Hey, what
do you get by crossing a person with a duck?"

Neither of us answered.

"I don't know either, but the kids
all take after their mother. Get it? The kids all take after
their mother."

David stopped in front of the main exit.
"I'll be back in a couple of hours. Why don't you get that
new extract in the tank. We can run it through this afternoon."
He dismissed Chaim with a cold glare.

Chaim shrugged, and made a weak smile.
"You're the boss. Hey, why don't you kids serious up? You're
having altogether too much fun." He shrugged again, and
walked away.

Tension increased by a factor of twelve.
David held the door for me, more impatient than chivalrous. "I'm
getting pretty tired of waiting for you," he said.

I could feel the storm behind his eyes,
about to burst. It was the same old argument.

* * *

At the Mivart Home, at my job, empty
time fills the air like the scent
of formaldehyde. I spend my every free moment doing the same
thing that everyone else does in their free time: I inspect myself
for deviance. I count my fingers; I knead the flesh around my
elbows, my shoulders; I examine the reflection of my face with
frightened attention to detail. There, that tiny bump, is it
only a pimple? And that mote of discoloration, nothing worse
than a freckle? I wriggle my toes. I run my hands up and down
my thighs. I concentrate my awareness on my genitals, is everything
well? Is everything unchanged? I imagine a dedicated army of
servant ants roaming the surface of my body, constantly on the
lookout for . . . the unusual. It passes the time.

Tonight has certainly been no less pleasant
than the usual. Poor Mr. H sprouted another limb, but painkillers
were administered and the old man took his new leg in stride.
Ms. R cried out once -- a soft and frightening howl -- as she
often did when giving birth to hopeful monsters, but to the staff,
to me, it was just another routine mitosis. When the relief nurse
finally arrives, I nod blankly and push myself out into the street.

I walk the five blocks home to my lonely
flat, through a dismal fog that stinks of ocean decay. The empty
streets fill me with a curious longing; looming shadows of derelict
cars flush fleet memories to the surface of my brain, memories
tinged with death, like the ghosts of rotting jellyfish.

I gasp involuntarily, and my breasts grind
against starched white linen. An image of a man's face surges
into my consciousness-but I catch it in time, stuff it back into
the deep well of repression, where it belongs. It would not be
wise to think of David. Not just yet. Not on an abandoned street,
thick with rancid fog.

For a long time, I conjured his face to
comfort myself. But in the end, the image always smeared, the
flesh peeled away, the horns sprouted; a thousand eyes would
erupt like some hellish pox. I would prefer not to remember him
that way. I would prefer to remember him as a strong and vibrant
lover, a gentle man who laughed with childish abandon. I can
not. I remember him as I last saw him. I remember him as he was.

* * *

"The doctor says you should rest."
I held one hand against David's
shoulder, and although he had once been able to carry me as easily
as I would a baby, he no longer had the strength to resist.

"Fuck the doctor." With a sigh
that was nearly a sob, he lay back into the bed. "I ought
to be able to do something. There has to be an answer."

Two lumps of bone protruded through the
thin skin of his forehead; the flesh around them glistened with
the sickening sheen of raw meat. I gently dabbed an anesthetic
gel on the hard boils that covered his cheeks. Several of them
had begun to split. "Just rest, my love." I whispered,
to camouflage the quivering agony in my voice.

"It's some kind of truly sick cosmic
joke. Only Chaim could've thought this one up, may he rest in
peace."

I considered trying to shush him, to make
him sleep, but talk was the only weapon left to him. I let him
talk.

"Who'd have thought. Three of the
stupidest bullshit theories ever advanced, and all three are
happening to me." A dry, hacking laugh strangled on the
way out, but the humor behind it seemed genuine. "Saltation:
evolution by spontaneous mutation. I'll bet I've changed species
three times since breakfast. Not even George Mivart himself would've
believed this one." He ticked a finger. "Then there's
punk-eeq. Punctuated Equilibrium, an explosive burst of adaptive
radiation. Hell, those guys were talking about an Event lasting
maybe, a million years, and making, say, a couple hundred thousand
new species. In the last two years, there's been more new species
happen on this block! Before this is over, there won't be any
room for good old Homo sapiens. No room at all." Another
finger. "And last, we got all that Lamarckian nonsense.
Zina, that old coot couldn't have been right. But you know, these
changes, all this . . . " He held out his arms, to encompass
himself, as well as all the pain and suffering in the wretched
world. ". . . all this is genetic. Not disease, not external,
not superficial: genetic. Every chromosome in my body reflects
this . . . mockery. If we made a baby, right now. . . ."
Sobs racked his skeletal frame.

And there it came. The old argument. And
it looked like this time, it just might get resolved.

"I'm so sorry," was all I could
say.

* * *

I arrive at my building, exhausted and
alone. I look in my mail pouch,
not expecting anything, and find nothing. Nothing familiar or
comforting survived the Punk-eeq Event. None of humanity's proud
trappings, none of the glorious institutions, none of the pretty
paragons of Homo sapiens sapiens' million-year struggle up the
evolutionary pyramid, none of it at all. All that remains is
the unaffected few -- the pure, unmutated few -- and their pathetic
attempt to preserve the unsullied genetic structure of a doomed
race.

An insane, drawn screech crashes down on
me from high above. I pointedly refuse to look. It will only
be another mutant birdman, chasing dogs that fly on chitinous
wings. Or something worse. There is always something worse.

The stairs to my flat creak a bit as I
take them, step by leaden step. They are worn, but fairly clean.
I sweep them every week. No one else climbs them anymore. The
man who lived in 38 was reported to Evolution Control for extra
fingers, webbed and growing from his wrist, and they had taken
him away. The landlady keeps to herself. In fact, she sealed
her door with bricks, save for a small opening through which
she receives her rations of food and my rent checks.

I lock my door carefully behind me, lean
against it and crush my eyes closed. A bead of sweat crawls across
my cheek.

I go immediately to the window. Kneel there,
hands clasped on my knees. Will my mind to peace. Stare in at
the cemetery. An imitation calm settles in on me. I kneel there,
motionless, until morning fog flees from the stern noon sun.
It is approaching mid-afternoon when . . .

I begin to notice the change.

Worker ants still stack their broken brothers
in neat little piles, but no longer at seeming random. An order
has begun to form from the chaos. The piles of bodies line precisely
cleared alleys: one major aisle runs the length of the windowsill,
and several others branch out at ninety-degree angles. The more
I look, the more patterns I see. The ants pile their dead in
perfect Euclidean pyramids. The ants observe strict rules of
traffic through the tiny streets.

I choke off a scream. Part of my mind explodes
in horror, but another part -- the scientist part, the controlling
part -- regards the miniature tableau with amused fascination.
My eyes begin to cross from the effort of watching; I exaggerate
the motion until my head aches, then abruptly, I laugh. I trace
a smiling face onto the glass with a moistened finger, a face
with many eyes.

The memory of David's funeral comes unhindered.
Without guilt, without anger. I live through the procession again,
and the brief ceremony, and the long trip home. I allow the image
of his face to form in the glass. When his flesh begins to peel
away from bony spurs, I do not recoil; I reach to touch it, feel
the cool glass smear beneath my fingers. When the eyes begin
to erupt, the skin splitting away with audible rips, I do not
retch; I embrace a soft ache in my breasts, a damp, electric
warmth in my crotch. I imagine David's children, my children.
The children that should have been. And I know that it's all
right. The children take after me.

I look back to the ants, and this time
the scream bursts out, erupts past my newfound contentment, past
the fresh greenery of peace that has only just begun to grow
across my barren scars. The scream bursts out, punctuating my
equilibrium with a sound like breaking glass.

The procession moves with somber elegance
through the main aisle. A team of black aphids draws the hearse.